Fix רפא״ל to רפאל

Communities ישראל (Israel)
1

Hi,

Following its restructure a few years earlier, Rafael changed its name from the acronym רפא״ל to a plain רפאל in 2007.

The four bus stops n1803084347, n1803084347, n5210715261 and n5210715262 (by the way, is there a shortcut for typing in a link to an OSM feature?), have some tags with רפא״ל values (with a different גרשיים character between the name tags and the gtfs tags).

After looking around a bit in this forum, I understand that the bus stops were imported by a script, so the source of the error might be at the origin database.

In any case, I wanted to fix them here; but since this fix involves multiple edits, I wanted to inform here in advance, as per the guidelines (well, this doesn’t exactly fall under “אירוע מיפוי המוני“, but since I’m a newbie in OSM, I also wanted to hear opinions and get advice from the more experienced users before I do this; there may be considerations I didn’t take into account. My previous edits were very local and very few).

My mother tongue is Hebrew, so feel free to respond in either language.

Thanks a lot!

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2

Thank you for confirming your intents.

Not 100% sure, but I’m afraid that next bus stops import will overwrite your changes with the values in official database. Usually what is imported is matches what is printed on the yellow bus stop sign. This is another reason to not touch the name tag so it will be in sync with “on-the-ground” sign. (can you check the signs?)

I’d just wait until official sources will do the fix. You can try to contact them.

Meanwhile you can add “alt_name” with the new name, but it will not be visible on the map and only be searcheable in various apps (doubt somebody searches for bus stops)

p.s. don’t know any shortcuts for id’s

Maybe @NeatNit can confrm if my guess is correct.

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3

Yes, what @yrtimiD said is correct.

The names of bus stops on OSM should match the name that appears on the sign. This name is also what appears in navigation apps (Egg, Rav-Pass, Moovit, …) and official websites like egged.co.il. If you want the name changed, you might have some luck contacting the Ministry of Transportation and letting them know.

If you can show me a photo that the physical sign on the stop doesn’t have the גרשיים, then I might look into changing the script’s policy. But until then, I have to assume the data from the MoT is accurate. Edit: and even in that case, we should just inform the MoT to update the data in the GTFS feed. I can contact them, they usually respond. Not always, though.

I’ll stick with English simply because you already did, but I’m equally comfortable with both languages so feel free to switch if you’re better with Hebrew.

Not that I know of! That would be nice, though…

This is deliberate. Nice that you noticed! :slight_smile:
I did my best to document it in the wiki in the Name section:

The name is improved from the GTFS name according to these rules:

  • Repeated single-quotation marks '' are converted to a double-quotation mark ". The GTFS data likely uses '' to avoid double-quotes being interpreted as delimiting a substring in the CSV format.
  • If there is a leading single-quotation mark, then it’s supposed to be a Geresh and it’s moved to the end. A lot of stops have this character in the wrong place.
  • Non-breaking space is replaced with normal space.
  • Leading and trailing whitespace is removed, and repeated spaces are merged together.
  • Double-quotation marks surrounded by Hebrew letters are converted to Gershayim (U+05F4 ״).
  • Single-quotation marks preceded by a Hebrew letter are converted to Geresh (U+05F3 ׳).

And in the later GTFS tags section:

gtfs:stop_name:IL-MOT=* - the Hebrew stop name, exactly as it appears in the GTFS data, without the improvements detailed above, except that leading and trailing whitespace is removed.

I hope you’ll agree that this results in better formatting. I am strongly in favor of using U+05F4 גרשיים instead of U+0022 quotation mark. Quotation mark can sometimes break text rendering in systems that don’t expect it to appear in the middle of a word. And I certainly won’t stand for two apostrophes, which is what the Ministry of Transportation provides!

4

@yrtimiD and @NeatNit, thank you both for your answers, and I’m really glad I posted here before touching anything!
I went through the gtfs2osm wiki page – sorry for missing that earlier, it actually answers most of my questions…
I went ahead and contacted the MoT GTFS support by the email address appearing at the bottom of their GTFS page. If I’ll get any response, I’ll update about it here.
I don’t live in that area, but I’ll try to get a photo of the yellow sign through someone else.
Thanks a lot again for your answers, and also in general (to you, and to a few other users I’ve seen frequently in this forum) for all of the effort, time and thought you put into this project and for all of your activity for the common good!

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No worries, most people miss it. Its main purpose is to be able to link to it in situations like this. I also don’t mind answering questions even if they’re already answered in that page.

Fantastic, thanks!

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